New build, anyone?

AMD has been putting the word out that it recently slashed prices for select A-Series desktop Accelerated Processor Units (APUs). Some of them are fairly significant reductions in price, and they're not just for Kaveri-based APUs, either -- they also include savings for a few Richland and Trinity chips. While Intel's Haswell architecture might have the upper hand in performance, the price cuts combined with superior integrated graphics help AMD stay in the game. Let's have a look.

New chip paves the way for more power IoT gadgets

ARM on Wednesday unveiled its Cortex-M7 processor, a 32-bit part that offers double the compute and digital signal processing (DSP) capability of today's most powerful ARM-based MCUs. The company intends for its Cortex-M7 chip to find a home inside high-end embedded applications in next generation vehicles, connected devices (think: Internet of Things, or IoT), smart appliances, and more.

After three long years of going hungry with quad-cores, red meat is finally back on the menu for enthusiasts. And not just any gamey slab full of gristle with shared cores, either. With its new eight-core Haswell-E CPU, Intel may have served up the most mouth-watering, beautifully seared piece of red meat in a long time.

A big boost for Xeon

Intel today announced its new Xeon processor E5-2600/1600 v3 product families designed to crunch through diverse workloads and the growing needs of data centers. These new processors sport several enhancements that Intel claims will result in up to a three-fold increase in performance compared to the previous generation (Xeon E5 v2 family). Among those enhancements are more processing cores and an upgrade from Ivy Bridge to Intel's Haswell architecture.

Intel's Core M will pave the way for even thinner hybrids

Get ready for a barrage of razor thin 2-in-1 systems this holiday season. They'll be powered by Intel's new Core M processor (codenamed Broadwell-Y), a low power part that became official today at the IFA trade show in Berlin. Intel purpose built the Core M processor to deliver high performance in ultra thin and fanless form factors, and the chip maker already has a number of hardware partners ready to bite.

The H75’s big brother is not too shabby

Over the past couple of years or so, we gearheads have transitioned from membrane keyboards to mechanical ones; from mechanical hard drives to SSDs; and from air-cooling our CPUs to using closed liquid loops. All favorable moves, though the latter group suffers from a lack of variety. You can get radiators in 120mm, 240mm, and 280mm sizes, but they’re almost all painted plain black with black tubing, although some include the small style concession of a glowing logo on the pump housing. Part of this has to do with just a handful of companies designing coolers for a large number of brands. This plainness may be a drag in a tricked-out rig, but in the case of the Corsair H105, we’ve discovered that a lack of fanciness can be an advantage.

Note: This review was originally featured in the May 2014 issue of the magazine.

Watch out for falling prices

How do you steal some thunder from Intel's Haswell-E launch? There are several options, and the one AMD went with was to slash prices on several 8-core FX-8000 and FX-9000 Series processors. In addition to rolling out some significant price cuts to half a dozen CPUs, AMD also introduced three new AM3+ FX chips -- they include the FX-8370, FX-8370E, and FX-8320E, all of which are also 8-core parts.

In a bit of a surprise to us, AMD and Origin PC wanted to come in together for episode 231 of the No BS Podcast. As you may recall, this is surprising considering that last October, Origin PC’s Co-founder and CEO Kevin Wasielewski announced that it would be dropping AMD graphics cards from its systems, stating, “This decision was based on a combination of many factors including customer experiences, GPU performance/drivers/stability, and requests from our support staff,” and whom also then added, “Based on our 15+ years of experience building and selling award winning high-performance PCs, we strongly feel the best PC gaming experience is on Nvidia GPUs.”

You can stuff 3TB of storage into this baby

Intel’s cool Next Unit of Computing (NUC) PCs have one serious limitation compared to say an All-In-One PC: storage. With room for just a single mSATA drive, NUC storage was limited to about 1TB. That’s no longer the case, though, thanks to the new NUC D54250WYKH, which accepts 2.5-inch drives in addition to mSATA devices.

Note: This review was originally featured in the May 2014 issue of the magazine.

Low cost laptops are on the rise

One thing Intel won't have any trouble doing in the coming months is moving low-cost laptop CPUs. That's because Microsoft and Intel are making concerted efforts with vendors to sell entry-level notebooks priced from around $200 to $250 in order to fend off the Chromebook push. As a result of this new focus, Intel is seeing a rise in the proportion of entry-level notebook CPUs, particularly its Pentium and Celeron chips.